Category Archives: Theorycrafting

I have questions regarding the cooldown-reduction (CDR) trinkets having taken a closer look at them.

If the healer trinket reduces all 3 minute major raid cooldowns by 27 seconds bringing them to roughly 2.5 minutes (2:33), is that something the design team thinks about when working on encounters and balancing them around abilities the raid has at its disposal? I only wonder this because the trinket is clearly powerful but potentially very situational and I wonder if it is similar to how heroic DS boss design had to take into account all tanks having their 4 piece set bonuses.

Right now the Amplify trinket appears to be a clear winner for one of our slots. Raw % throughput (greater than that from an int trinket in the same slot) with a significant secondary stat boost is always welcome. All of this coupled with the intellect proc is amazing for sure and borderline overpowered requiring some tuning. Given the raw power of the amplify ability I can only assume the int proc must be treated as a secondary bonus.

Looking at the next slot the question then becomes: will this 27 second cooldown reduction from the CDR trinket allow me to squeeze one more meaningful tranquility in on this fight or am I slotted into a rotation I must save it for. If an additional tranquility can’t be added, the reduction on Nature’s Swiftness/Ironbark may not be enough to warrant using the trinket unless the trigger intellect has enough uptime to make it a strong primary draw. Without the potential to add a raid saving tranquility to the fight (assuming the fight warrants it) then this trinket concerns me.

That being said, the int proc is still there on both of these trinkets and isn’t something to scoff at

I haven’t seen any quick math on the ICD and uptime on this 11,761 intellect as of yet and I hope someone might have that information handy or if I have missed it earlier somewhere please direct me there. I need to know how spiky/reliable it is. If it has a relatively reasonable uptime then it could compete directly with the static int trinket (which would then only be good as a mana regen option). If the uptime is lower then I think this proc might prove FAR too spiky for healers or at the very least my own preference.

I like the idea of the CDR trinkets and they are certainly more interesting than +intellect as a primary bonus for sure; I just have concerns over how critical the bonus is for throughput and how it is being factored in, if at all, for boss design. I also wonder just how they are weighting this intellect proc as well.

This is my brain droppings for Sunday evening. If you have any thought on my ramblings or have some technical information to clear up any confusion or assumptions on my part please share them with me.

So there’s datamined patch information that has a rather hefty list of changes for you as a restoration druid. Let’s just dig right in and go through them as well as what the ramifications will be.

1.) Nature’s Swiftness has become baseline. You no longer have to give up a talent option to take this iconic, and mandatory, talent. In place of Nature’s Swiftness there is a new passive ability that bears looking at: Ysera’s Gift. Now here are your two options for 5.4:

-Ysera’s Gift – passive – heals you for 5% of your maximum hp every 5 seconds. If you are at maximum health, it is smart healed to an ally. Assuming early 5.4 gear you’ll probably have in the low 600’s K for health meaning this will be ticking for roughly 30,000 every 5 seconds. Assuming the raid is not entirely full on health, this will always produce worthwhile healing adding up to 5K hp/s in this case. Is this worthwhile healing? At the rate at which it ticks i’d argue that it would more often than not end up as meter fluffing and never really save anyone except yourself. Your mileage may vary.

-Cenario Ward – 30s CD – Protective barrier that triggers upon taking damage healing for a large amount over 6 seconds. At ~40K spellpower this heals for roughly 54,000 every 2 seconds or 162,000 total over 6 s. This is not an overwhelming amount of healing and will usually not be enough to save the tank from imminent demise. It can however soften damage from blows that would generally not outright kill the tank anyway to lighten the healing load. It’s about 5K hp/s at that gear level as well.

I think this will be a case of pick your flavor. If the fight requires more direct tank healing you can opt for Ward. If the fight has consistent raid damage that needs addressing, then Ysera’s Gift provides it with absolutely no thought required.

2.) Soul of the Forest was buffed to 100% spell haste bonus. Didn’t really think it was necessary but perhaps their internal math felt it wasn’t pulling its weight on a throughput level (not factoring in mana savings). All this will really do is force us to create a new haste break point spreadsheet :)

3.) Tier 6, Level 90 talents, received a revamp.

Update: NV is actually quite amazing in practice with the smart healing component and currently is looking to be a clear cut winner for level 90 talents. Further discussion pending additional feedback.

Dream of Cenarius is no longer the terrible shell of a talent for us that it used to be. It now grants you the ability to attonement heal. Every wrath you cast hits for 20% more and heals a raid member for 100% of the damage done. Note that wrath has had its mana cost increase by roughly 50%.

Nature’s Vigil now also allows all direct heals cast while active to heal additional raid members for 25% of the amount healed. The rest of the talent remains the same. Update: It is unclear at this time if it is direct heals or all single target healing spells which would include lifebloom and rejuvenation.

Heart of the Wild, when activated, also increases your healing done by some percentage. It seems to be them justifying the talent for restoration since many people i’d wager never activate it. Update: Buff is 25% to healing done! Fairly significant even if it is only once or sometimes twice an encounter if they run long.

I think this is a choice that remains simple yet complicated. Personally I think it comes down to Heart of the Wild and Dream of Cenarius on a fight to fight basis. I don’t particularly enjoy parking and casting however I am willing to admit that for some encounters with tight DPS checks and phases with minimal damage it can be an option. Heart of the Wild plays more to your strengths overall however it obviously doesn’t allow for the flexibility DoC does in that while DPS’ing with the CD (should you do it) you can’t heal at the same time without shifting gears. I will still probably default to Heart of the Wild as it still benefits our HoT centric style of play, especially with the new addition of Genesis.

I stand by Nature’s Vigil being the most lackluster of the bunch according to my taste. A 10% throughput boost, while very good, is not significant enough to really feel like a bonus from my point of view and the trigger activating only on direct heals seems counter intuitive. Depending on HotW’s throughput bonus, once we know more, we’ll be able to math out ultimately which will provide the most consistent benefit. Stay tuned to this one. Preferences for these talents change at the drop of a hat.

4.) Genesis – activated ability with no cooldown listed as of yet. This spell will quickly activate all of your remaining rejuvenations making them heal and expire at 400% the normal rate. If you cast 6 rejuvenations for example and then immediately used Genesis you would have the first one expire in a little over a second, and the last expire in just over two and a half seconds. Each would produce healing equivalent to however much is left on them.

This spell, provided that it doesn’t play havoc with haste break points and allow for additional ticks that were otherwise unobtainable, is a slight mana loss (the cost of genesis) for a break even in the amount healed and a significant increase in your burst. Since there is set up required for genesis in the form of multiple rejuvenations, it does not need a cooldown. Much like Wild Mushroom: Bloom you are responsible for how aggressive you wish to be with it. You can use it a little or a lot provided your rejuvenations haven’t come close to expiring before hitting the button.

Expect to see this ability as a staple in your healing rotation/toolkit come 5.4. There will more than likely be multiple raid wide damage events that can be predicted in much the same way priests use their absorbs. Prehot the number of people you feel reasonable (3,4,5 perhaps) and let it rip once the damage goes out. Just make sure if you plan to use Swiftmend that you keep the last rejuvenation target as your fuel as they will disappear fast.

Genesis can also be used to TURBO charge your wild mushrooms if you deem it absolutely necessary. Since the window for genesis is small, limited by the time remaining on the heals, storing it up in the mushroom for imminent use gives you a slightly large window if absolutely need be.

5.) Wild Mushroom Bloom received a massive fix. The mushroom’s base healing was significantly increased because now you can only plant one of them. It accrues overhealing at 2/3 the rate they do now but holds the same maximum amount. The plus side though is that it is completely transplantable. You can pick it up and move it without losing the stored bonus healing. While not a perfect spell you can always guarantee you have it active and ready for raid damage with this new change.

Update:

Wild Mushroom: Bloom is no longer capable of critical strikes, and accumulates overhealing done by Rejuvenation by 100%, down from 150%. Overhealing bonus no longer benefits from Naturalist or Mastery: Harmony.

Make no mistake, this is still a great buff. Wild Mushroom is already potent and you can easily work around the drawbacks that come with this change. Between this and Genesis you are now armed with some really nice Burst options for healing. Keep this in mind when you’re looking at heroic encounters in 5.4. Having a fully charged mushroom you can literally transplant and bloom immediately as needed has far reaching applications. Sure this new found versatility is offset by the overheal the spell is likely to do but that is factored into the spell’s throughput by Blizzard I would imagine.

6.) Innervate finally scales with our stats! It is truly a miracle. We have been stuck compared to other healers unable to really benefit from spirit as much as other classes for a long while. This break has left some druids eschewing spirit for mastery when possible and some (of which I am one admittedly) going up into the 12K spirit range for heroic encounters. The new innervate model grants us 50% of our spirit as mana per second for 10 seconds.

Presently Innervate gives 60,000 mana every three minutes. A total of 1,667 mp/5. A number that was probably more impressive doing Tier 14 normals. Comparing that to Mistweavers Brew, Shaman specific MTT benefits, and Rapture is fairly lackluster with current gear.

The new innervate, provided that you have at least 12,000 spirit will give the same amount of mana in return. This seems to be initiated to balance what it provides using a ToT Normal gear level as a pivot point. Every 1 point of spirit you add beyond 12,000 provides 1 mp/5 more than what you would have with the current version on top of its usual benefit. I’ll probably do some gear related math once we know more in order to show just how much regen you’ll really be getting when deciding what spirit soft cap to settle down with.

Glyph of Innervate introduces the innervate swap trick we used to do between two druids. If you have another restoration druid in your raid, however unlikely this might be especially if you are doing heroic content, you could each take this glyph and swap with each other for a 20% boost to each players gained mana. This assumes of course you are both at roughly the same amount of spirit. Personally I am not convinced this is enough of a gain to make it worth it especially with the coordination involved.

7.) Tier 16 set bonuses are poop.

8.) New Glyph: Glyph of Efflorescence increases the healing done by Swiftmend by 20%, causes the Efflorescence healing effect to be triggered by Wild Mushroom instead of Swiftmend, and lasts as long as the Wild Mushroom is active. This glyph is actually fairly significant. It transforms Wild mushroom into a constant effloressence field along with boosting Swiftmend as a direct emergency heal. This could very well become a staple for us moving forward given its implications. Being able to constantly move and replace mushrooms seamlessly can translate to a large amount of bonus healing through the Efflo field.

I may be leaving some things out and I’m rather tired at the moment so my analysis is probably full of holes but please read and enjoy.

I ended up breaking my 4 piece Tier 14 set fairly early on in order to clean up my leg slot (and get spirit) but found myself still using Soul of the Forest for certain encounters. Because of this I wanted to do another round-up of Soul of the Forest (and the many ways it can be used) in order to evaluate what we really end up getting out of it. All of this math is based upon a theoretical situation where each wild growth will find a sufficient number of targets that are in need of its full healing potential.

I understand that that there are situations where less than 6 (or 5) people are wounded and that does change the math considerably. I’ll try to address that to some degree here.

First let’s get the math out of the way before everyone’s eyes glaze over permanently! This is perfectly world stuff though and does not accurately simulate actual boss battle damage models.

With Glyph: hits 6 people and can be cast approximately 6 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 6 x 6 x 49,989 = 1,799,604 health per minute.

Costs 13,740 mana each time for a total of 82,440 mana, an overall HPM of 21.83

Without Glyph: hits 5 people and can be case approximately 7.5 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 7.5 x 5 x 49,989 = 1,874,587 health per minute.

Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 18.19

Wild Growth with the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With my current test setup my wild growth healed a single person (14 ticks) for 87,589 health, or roughly 75% more than a non SotF Wild Growth as we expected.

This spell will be cast approximately 4 times a minute healing for 6 x 4 x 87,589 for a total of 2,102,150 health per minute. This is roughly 302K more healing than without SotF talented.

Costs 54,960 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 38.25. You save 27,480 mana per minute which is approximately raw 2,290 mp/5.

Wild Growth without the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With this setup you will be casting 7.5 Wild Growths per minute. I will say we average out to 3.75 non SotF casts and 3.75 SotF casts. It doesn’t line up evenly with the minute marker so that is just a crude breakdown.

Your total healing done per minute with this scenario is 2,579,609 health per minute. Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 25.033

So here are the totals for all of the conditions we have investigated:

Regular Wild Growth /w Glyph

– Health per minute: 1,799,604 baseline

– HPM: 21.83

– MP/5 difference: Baseline, 0

Regular Wild Growth w/o Glyph

– Health per minute: 1,874,587 (+75K)

– HPM: 18.19

– MP/5 difference: -1,717 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth /w Glyph

– Health per minute: 2,102,150 (+302K)

– HPM: 38.25

– MP/5 difference: +2,290 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth w/o Glyph (alternating)

– Health per minute: 2,579,609 (+780K)

– HPM: 25.033

– MP/5 difference: -1,717 mp/5

Take this with a grain of salt

We know firsthand that not EVERY cast of your wild growth is going to heal 6 people when glyphed rendering the glyph less optimal for that moment in time. We know that raid damage isn’t even going to warrant the spell being cast for periods of time. That aside these numbers still provide useful information.

Comparing this ability to Tree of Life is quite difficult to say the least. Using the most common example of SotF /w Glyph, you would have a theoretical healing gain of 906K every three minutes with a mp/5 gain of 2,290 constant. I can’t really model the mana savings from Incarnation’s clearcasting (though that is a legitimate usage of the spell to begin with) but in order for it to be comparable throughput wise, 20% of your healing done over 30 seconds would need to equal 906K. For that to happen you’d need to be putting out somewhere in the realm of ~200,000 HPS. The thing is, for periods of insanely intense damage that is NOT easily done but you will get up fairly high. You just need to tailor your usage of the spell to get the best mileage you can really.

While it seems like this post is an ad for Soul of the Forest be advised that it is not the case. Soul of the Forest is a nice passive style benefit that gives you mana back and boosts your throughput by a sizeable amount. Its effect averaged out through the course of an encounter is very strictly controlled by how the fight plays out and how closely you are able to adhere to the theoretical numbers above. Depending on how periodic the damage is you may find yourself going for stretches without having an opportunity to fully 100% benefit from your wild growth. Tree of Life has the advantage of being something you can plan and tailor your use to maximize its benefit on a per encounter basis. The catch is that sometimes there’s no one moment where Tree would be substantially beneficial and then it turns into a mana saving temporary boost cooldown.

You will more than likely find yourself waffling between these two abilities as you progress through normal or heroic mode encounters. I know for a fact I carry plenty of tomes of me in order to swap the talent on the fly.

Disclaimer: This is very napkin math-y. If you are one of those other math loving folks out there and you spot an error in my numbers please let me know so that I may address it as soon as possible.

So where are we going with these Wild Mushrooms! …and how did we get here?

It’s no secret that right now restoration druids are at the bottom of the pile. We don’t offer any significant raid cooldowns that other classes don’t do better and we have no spammable AoE burst healing. In any fight where the raid groups up we should, barring any skill variance, fall behind other healers and even more so if the fight caters well to spirit shell. This isn’t to say that we are not useful as druid healing is, as always, incredibly potent at helping to stabilize the raid.

Blizzard ‘seems’ to be acknowledging this with their change to wild mushrooms. Their idea is to allow us to take a percentage of our rejuvenation overhealing, which will happen when our heals get sniped in frantic healing situations, and funnel it into a sizeable mushroom bloom when needed. What this does is allow them to keep the bloom cooldown at 10 seconds, but arrange it so that should we want these mushrooms at full potential the cooldown effectively becomes much longer and requires additional mana in the form of rejuvenation casts.

Functionality:

The current build suggests that each mushroom can ‘store’ up to 33% of our total health pool as additional bonus healing (completely subject to additional tweaks) and upon release will split the healing done among all targets within range. With three mushrooms this would be a total amount of bonus healing equal to 100% of your total health or approximately 460K (before mastery and other such bonuses).

Limitations:

Other AoE effects state that a fixed amount of life is returned per tick and is usually subjected to diminishing returns. Ghostcrawlers terminology seems to imply that this healing done is split evenly between all members caught within the blast. This also seems to imply that there is no diminishing returns and that the effect is simply limited by the amount you were able to store in the mushrooms and the number of players involved.

Speculations and Assumptions:

I am assuming that his terminology means that the amount healed is not divided by some fixed number in the anticipation of healing a certain number of players. Swiftmend for example heals three people for a fixed amount and will not increase the amount healed if only one person (the MT for example) stands within it. If that is the case then the ability can be used in some creative ways.

Charging the mushrooms

Depending on the encounter a set of mushrooms may take somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds to fill up if people are taking damage. You could certainly game the system by placing multiple rejuvenations on players who are not hurt (especially if they have any way to increase healing received) to speed it up. The new 4 piece Tier 15 set bonus seems to have a rather interesting synergy with this as well. With this new set bonus each time rejuvenation heals (1 initial 4 ticks at base cast, 5 ticks at standard haste levels) it gains a 6% increase to healing done. For those using the first haste break point it means it ticks at 100%, 106%, 112%, 118%, 124%, and 130%.

If one were to get your haste into the mid six thousands, something feasible in t14, and more than likely really feasible in T15, you could use the tier 15 set bonus along with the new Soul of the Forest to pull off interesting shenanigans. Let’s say your rejuvenation ticks for 15,000 base non crit. With the 70% haste from Soul of the Forest and T15 4 piece bonus your rejuvenation would tick 9 times for a total of ~190,000. This one rejuvenation, if entirely overheal would contribute 47,625 bonus healing to each mushroom which is about 1/3 of what it can store. Each additional rejuvenation would each contribute 25,875 bonus healing. This means one supercharged rejuvenation and 4 regulars might be enough to fill up your mushrooms provided they were overhealing.

While this can speed up the process of charging up the mushrooms I don’t know if giving up Incarnation is worth it nor might it be worth it to encourage a playstyle focused on gathering up overhealing. All of my numbers are entirely speculative though as I’m pulling some stuff out of the air and much of the ability isn’t anywhere close to finalized.

Use

So the question is what do we DO with this new version of wild mushroom. The answer is…it depends. With some tier 15 gear you’ll probably be able to get your HP up to 470,000 or 480,000 with somewhere in the realm of 23 to 24% mastery provided you don’t change your haste target. Let’s say this gives us a bank of 595,000 bonus healing in your mushrooms (198,400 individual mushroom). Right now mushrooms heal for 10K give or take a little bit. I don’t know exactly how much because…well I don’t care to know. With diminishing returns in 25 man it probably dips down to the 6K or 7K range more than likely.

Assuming that the bloom splits the bonus healing evenly with no penalty on top of the core explosion then on a 23 person group (often times the tanks aren’t standing on your side of the boss when grouped up) you have 26K healing per person and something like 32K per person if you get the core explosion too. This means you can heal each member for a whopping 6.7% of their life. This is a little less than two ticks of rejuvenation on everyone. I’m not going to say that I’m particularly excited about this because it doesn’t feel like a massive benefit for the amount of time and mana invested. I’d like to know if someone has the math on how much per person Healing Rain gives over its duration.

In a 10 man raid things change slightly. Let’s say the tanks are standing on one side of the boss and you have 8 players standing on the other side. In this scenario each player would be healed for 74K from the bonus healing and 80K if the core explosion is added. This would be ~17% of everyone’s health which is almost like feeding a healthstone to the whole raid. Now we’re getting somewhere.

If you push it a little further and refine the explosion to cover only select numbers of people then you will see even more burst potential though highly focused. They would heal one person for 600,000, two people for 300,000, three people for 200,000, four people for 150,000 etc. You have the potential to provide a spare lay on hands for the tank or some sizeable heals for anyone forced to soak a certain mechanic in a known area of the battlefield.

Catch

As with everything there are considerable catches to this spell.

-Just as before you must deal with the 3 GCD’s to place them.

-You must now charge them up and monitor the amount stored within them though I would wager a guess someone will create a mod to track this for you.

-Then you must time your detonation to maximize its effect. There is a risk a good portion of your explosion will end up overhealing if you are trying to heal say half of your 23 people who took damage while clustered together.

-The raid or raid member(s) might be forced to move away from the designated location making your effort for naught. The counter to this is that the mushrooms should be quite large and easy to spot so your designated people might still be able to run to them and get healed.

Verdict

I find their idea interesting but ultimately somewhat underwhelming given the setup. It doesn’t seem like they will be amazing at solving some of our current weaknesses which is a reliable tool to handle burst AoE damage in raids and a reliable tool to keep us even when the raid is grouped up doing AoE healing. In those scenarios the ability will be going off only every so often and not for a significant amount compared. There is some serious potential In using them on smaller groups of people but there is a high level of coordination involved making sure those people are near the mushrooms at the time you need to detonate them. This may end up being a high risk, high investment, poor or risky reward type scenario. You could have fabulous luck with it and you could have absolutely abysmal luck with it.

Tank Healing – potential to be a free lay on hands every 30 or 40 seconds during a fight with some coordination if the cards all fall where they need to fall.

25 man Raid Healing – potential to be a modest heal among your raid (28-30K), a medium heal among your melee or ranged (50-75K), and a decent heal among a small group of players (75-125K) if everything goes right

10 man Raid Healing – potential to be medium heal among your raid (75-95K) , a decent heal among just melee or ranged (100-150K) if everything goes right

In a world where we have a fixed mana supply we need to think about how much mana we have available and how much we’d like to have available. This is purely napkin math though so please don’t take it as canon. I just like to think about resources in a more analytical sense. First let us try to approximate some stats for our theoretical druid. I’ll leave the equations out so you can certainly modify them to suit your needs.

The numbers:

Spirit Regen:

Let us assume we have a modestly geared raiding druid who currently has 14,750 intellect (with HotW) and 9,000 spirit baseline. There are other factors that will increase regeneration and we will add those in in a moment.

Spirit regeneration = (.001+Spirit*(sqrt(Int))*Base_Regen)*5

Using some known character sheets and crunching some basic math I’ve come up with a value of .00374 for Base_Regen which means this druid’s spirit based regeneration is 20,440 mp/5. With the 50% in combat tax we get 10,220 mp/5. Given that we only really care about in combat regen we can apply the 50% penalty to the Base_Regen value reducing it to .000187

With the addition of mark of the wild and spirit flask/food (which are taboo to some I know) the druids stats change gaining 700 intellect and 1250 spirit. He now has 15,450 intellect and 10,250 spirit. These changes change our regeneration to 11,912 mp/5.

There is of course more spirit based regeneration to take into account. Let us assume this druid is using the Darkmoon Faire trinket and Shado-Pan Valor Point rep trinket. I’m going to, at least for now, set the Relic of Chi Ji at 1,250 average spirit, and the Scroll of Revered Ancestors at 899 average spirit. This 2,149 additional spirit for this druid when raid buffed yields 2,497 mp/5.

The last thing I’d like to add is mana tide totem. Not everyone has the benefit of having one of these available should you raid in a 10 man but it is worthwhile noting what it grants you. Let’s assume that the shaman has 10,000 spirit (I know it is probably low) spirit raid buffed when activating the totem. This grants you 20,000 spirit for 16 seconds every three minutes. With a 9% uptime this gives you an average spirit bonus of 1,800 or 2,091 mp/5.

Additional class/common sources of regen:

Innervate is our class’ primary source of mana regeneration outside of spirit. For right now there are two scenarios I will entertain. I am going to assume a fight that lasts roughly 7 to 7.5 minutes during which there is at least a short period of ramp-up in the beginning. During this fight if it is less taxing you will more than likely use two innervates. If the fight is heroic and it hits the ground running you might use 3 (30 second mark, 3:30 mark, and 6:30 mark). Let’s opt for two innervates for the moment and we could always average it up to 2.5 if you so desire. Two innervates yield 120,000 mana. Divide this out over a 7 minute encounter and you have 1,429 mp/5.

Mana potions are not terribly significant but they are generally useful as they can offer you some mana in a lump sum at a key point between innervates if stuff is going wrong. I don’t remember the exact amount but if you are using the channeling potion that returns 40,000 or so mana back you’ll be giving yourself another 476 mp/5.

I am not including the priest hymn or Omen of Clarity because I don’t have the exact math to back it up. Given that Omen casts, while mana saving, are free they don’t really factor into fight longevity anyways. They are still, of course, awesome.

Total:

What we are left with us the following: 11,912 + 2,497 + 2,091 + 1,427 + 476 = 18,403 mp/5

Constant Spells

There are certain spells that you are going to cast whether you like it or not. These spells are: Lifebloom, Wild Growth, and Swiftmend. These spells are good enough and potent enough that they will be used on cooldown and must be utilized to their fullest over the length of an encounter. As such you can almost think of them as constant sources of mana drain. Whatever is left over after that is fair game for…well the one other bread and butter spell we have really. Yes Tree of Life changes the math entirely but as that is technically an option I’m going to forgo the math on that at least for now.

Lifebloom will be recast approximately 3 times every minute. I am assuming there will be some amount of target swapping. This produces a negative 885 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Swiftmend will be cast approximately 4 times every minute. I am assuming aggressive use of this spell as it provides significant benefit to multiple targets or it can provide supplemental healing to your tank as required. This equates to a negative1,700 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Wild Growth is generally good enough to be cast on cooldown however I know that not all fights require it to be cast ALL the time especially right off the bat. White you can technically cast the spell 6 times per minute let us assume that based on fight mechanics it only averages out to 5 (though it might be lower if the fight is less AoE taxing). At 5 casts per minute this equates to a negative 5,725 mp/5 drain on your mana.

If you think about your mana as a budget then these abilities constitute your rent, insurance, student loans, food etc. They add up to a total of 8,310 mp/5 drain.

What’s left

If our napkin math is holding up we can figure out roughly what we have remaining. Our regen provided us with 18,403 mp/5 and we remove 8,310 mp/5 from it leaving us with 10,093 mp/5. Our simulation here is extremely crude mind you but we can approximate, using this, just how much we have to spend on rejuvenation and regrowth as required.

Assuming the 7 minute encounter that I hypothesized above, this regen provides you with 847,812 mana in addition to your base 300,000 mana for a total of 1,147,810 mana.

Leaving you ~2% mana for wiggle room and casting additional spells as needed

I do understand that regrowth usage is entirely subjective and is fight dependent. You might find yourself using way more of it depending on burst requirements for both tank and raid members.

Character Growth

As the player develops his gear he or she will acquire additional intellect and spirit on their pieces in approximately a 1:2 ratio purely by way of item level. He or she may also opt for sidegrades (or gem) that grant additional spirit at the expense of other secondary stats and maintain a constant intellect level. The amount of mp/5 required to gain 1 additional rejuvenation over the course of the 7 minute battle is 114 mp/5. To achieve this they must add either 98 spirit, or 85 spirit and 42 intellect.

Note: As the fight gets longer than 7 minutes the above complete mana pool numbers will shift significantly however the amount of spirit needed to add rejuvenations also drops (though each rejuvenation added is a smaller % of your overall healing done). If the fight lasts for say, 10 minutes, then the amount of regen needed to add one more rejuvenation becomes 80 mp/5. This means only 70 spirit (or 60 spirit and 30 intellect) is required to grant you an additional cast.

Assuming you use Nature’s Vigil in a smart manner it could average out to the theoretical 5% healing bonus. At first glance you might think “Welp…6% is greater than 5% so that’s a no brainer!” Now you might be someone who prefers passive always on bonuses versus on demand cooldowns and I’m generally one of those people. I’d rather be pretty good all the time as opposed to awesome some of the time. This is personal preference though. What we need to keep in mind is that the Nature’s Vigil is an increase to all healing done. This includes the base healing component of the spell. For any math I may do in the coming month I am going to leave out any static bonuses that our class specialization applies to healing numbers as that would be constant regardless of the talent choice.

Now I expect in MoP our intellect levels will rise to ludicrous levels and they will dwarf the base healing components of our spells but they are certainly still there. Right now we know that a 30% increase to the healing benefit of our intellect equates to a ‘theoretical’ average of 5% overall (less than HotW) but we also get a 30% boost to base healing. As long as a 30% boost to base healing is equal to the effective healing gained from a 6% increase in intellect (or more) then NV will produce more throughput.

I’ve tried to come up with some good examples but I’m missing too many variables to produce numbers that make sense. What I can say is that going strictly on primarily abilities alone NV can theoretically produce a greater throughput bonus than HotW at least initially. Since NV scales less with gear there is always the chance that HotW can produce more eventually. We all know with healing cooldowns though that you don’t always get perfect uptime so it is incredibly difficult to really nail it down.

Heart of the Wild continues to be problematic as its secondary ability (or primary depending on whether or not you ask blizzard) isn’t that useful for restoration druids. Getting some neat offspec tools is nice in theory, but as every druid blogger has griped about taking the time NOT healing is the biggest problem regardless of what we may or may not be able to offer. Nature’s Vigil has the benefit of dishing out free damage that is more than likely less than what we’d be doing if we popped Heart of the Wild and went straight nuke. The fact that it does this damage while we continue to heal at the cost of no GCD’s from spells or shifting is priceless in my opinion. What it will come down to is fight mechanics. If the fight has a glaringly OBVIOUS burn phase with little to no damage that needs help from healers then sure Heart of the Wild will be the best choice there. If the fight is designed in any other way with standard healing hurdles then Nature’s Vigil is a good choice. If you’re the kind of person that HATES hitting cooldowns or forgets to use them then you could just take Heart of the Wild as the simpler option.

Moonkin will more than likely face the same dilemma as restoration druids but since they really won’t factor in the healing from NV at all, I’d expect that someone will calculate a threshold at which HotW’s static bonus does or does not overtake it. After that it is simply a matter of whether or not the fight has a dedicated burn phase.

So yeah that’s my lunchtime musings on the newer level 90 talents. Hope your day is going well I need to get back to work!

As my previous mana regen equation posts this will be a bit mathy but there are still some useful bits of information to take away from it even if you aren’t math inclined. I will try to keep this post a little shorter than my other ones as the basics have been covered already. The math herein is subject to some review when I am less sleepy or I receive feedback to the contrary.

ASSUMPTIONS (review)

What we know is that at any particular level of intellect adding more spirit gives us a constant amount of mana regen. I have tested this before and found that to be a factual statement. Same as before the value of intellect based regen is generated by using a ‘perfect world’ approximation of our innervate, replenishment, and revitalize mana returns and distributing them out over the course of a fight. My math assumes roughly a six to seven minute encounter for the purposes of valuing intellect regen. I do understand that longer fights will depreciate this regen somewhat.

EXPERIMENT

In order to generate a linear approximation of our mana regen relative to spirit and intellect, as opposed to the high order equation you may have seen elsewhere by theorycrafters, I evaluated my mana regen at multiple levels of intellect by way of buffs and the addition and subtraction of brilliant gems in my gear. This data was placed into a spreadsheet and a linear approximation was determined.

NOTE: this math was created for intellect ranging from 8344 to 9045 with mark of the wild active. The equation holds true higher than these values but the farther you push the less accurate it will be.

EQUATIONS:

Through experimental data the following linear interpretation of the spirit/intellect relationship at higher intellect levels should hold true:

Mana Regen (spirit) = ((.00008913)(Int)+.784)(Spirit)

This should be what pops up when you highlight “spirit” on your character sheet. It will read “Increases mana regeneration by X per 5 seconds while not casting”. In order to find your true mp/5 in combat simply divide the number by 2. In the meantime I will refer to Mana Regeneration as a stat, not true mp/5. For the purposes of these equations, when I refer to ‘Int’ I am referring to the number that shows up in your character screen WITH mark of the wild active. Intellect based regen remains unchanged.

These days regeneration is less of a concern for us because we are eschewing spirit in favor of other stats with the swiftly increase levels of intellect available to us. You may not get a large amount of use out of them but they can still be used to tell you something about your overall longevity. The intellect regeneration scales fairly well with our gear and every 112.2 (modified) intellect increases our spirit’s regen by 1%.

In order to see what you are gaining when looking at new gear we need to add a couple more variables. Right now we have:

Int = intellect as listed on your character sheet with mark of the wild active

Sp = spirit as listed on your character sheet

We need to add the following:

I(delta) = the gain or loss of raw intellect, as it is written on the item’s or items’ tooltips (before leather mastery, furor, motw etc.) when comparing gear or gear sets

S(delta) = the gain or loss of spirit as it is written on the item’s or items’ tooltips

Hope I haven’t lost you so far! There is a lot going on here but even the windows calculator can help you work through it in no time at all. If you’re looking at the effects of changing only one of the two stats at a time, I(delta) or S(delta) then its a lot easier to evaluate the change.

For I(delta) the following tells us the regen change per each point of raw intellect gained:

d(Effective regen)/I(delta)=1.22 + 0.000103(Spirit)

For S(delta) the following tells us the regen change per each point of raw spirit gained:

d(Effective regen)/S(delta)=(0.00008913(Int)+.784)

For my current gear, these two values would be 1.474 and 1.553 respectively. Given that intellect gives throughput puts it ahead in the end, but we knew that already.